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Facebook's IPO is making everyone feel a little uneasy. This was supposed to be the mother of all offerings. The one that proved Silicon Valley is roaring and ready to prop up the rest of America.

Instead, we have stock that's currently trading considerably under the offering price, an S.E.C. probe, and lawsuits flying that claim the company and its underwriters unfairly docked expectations (or at least unfairly spread the word about those lowered expectations).

There's also the pernicious perception that insiders -- Mark Zuckerberg, his rich venture capital backers, and connected equity investors -- sold out early anticipating the fall. That may or may not be true, but either way it just looks bad.

But that's yesterday's news. The larger question is whether Facebook is an indicator or an outlier of what to expect in technology offerings and stocks generally.

There's plenty of fodder for the Facebook-as-exception theory. Is Facebook a technology company? Yes, technology determines whether people will use the social network more or less. It also will drive the success of advertising on Facebook. And yet Facebook makes most of its revenue simply selling online real estate for ads.

In that way, the slick social network looks more like a newspaper. So perhaps Facebook tells us more about the media business than than it does about anything driving technology. Then again (indicator theory), demand for advertising should hint at larger economic trends.

Facebook's offering seems awfully unique (holding up the outlier theory again). The underwriters drummed up demand and increased the debut price, from $28 to $35 a share, to a final $38. Meanwhile, and this is truly an exception, the company mid-road show announced that its ability to monetize new customers was deteriorating. Facebook did this in the form of an amended S-1 on May 9th.

It was never a typical IPO. In the litany of digests detailing how bankers swarmed the social network, there's a clear sense that Zuckerberg and his CFO David Ebersman called the shots and therefore the lofty price. That's a role usually reserved for Wall Street bankers. The best evidence of this: even the usual underwriter fee was docked, reportedly to 1.1%. Everyone wanted in on the Facebook IPO for prestige P.R., so the deal terms perhaps weren't Wall Street's to decide.

And that may be one of Facebook's great imprints on the market going forward this year. "The deals that come out later this year will be priced very conservatively because of Facebook," explains Marc Chaikin, a Forbes contributor who runs Chaikin Stock Research, an investor tools and rating source. There are also signs that valuations, even in the business software space, have been too rich. Recent IPO Splunk, for example, is off of its offering price.*

There is a long list of technology companies rumored to be looking to debut in the public market: Marin Software, Workday, Marketo, Tableau Software, Zuora, and Cloudera, to name a few. These are fast-growing firms, some profitable, but they lack the broad market appeal that Facebook commands. If bankers act as Chaikin predicts (and executives at these firms listen), these newcomers could be the real deals for investors in 2012.

*(A correction here, thanks readers: Splunk's IPO price was $17, the stock shot up to $36.20 in its first week of trading and currently is at $34.89 a share after a recent 10% bump.)